Serenella Iovino, Gli animali di Calvino. Storie dell’Antropocene, 2023

From The Path of Spider’s Nests to Palomar, Italo Calvino never stopped telling stories about animals. But what do a colony of Argentinean ants in western Liguria, an albino gorilla in the Barcelona zoo, a hen in a Turin workshop, wayward cats in an industrial city and a rabbit escaped from the clutches of vivisectors have in common? The answer is simple: they are all animals that tell us about us humans and the way in which our species has become so heavy on the Earth as to bring about a new geological age: the Anthropocene. Following in Calvino’s footsteps through the stories of these five seemingly improbable protagonists, Serenella Iovino tells us about an age in which the animal is menacing and threatened, and above all is not the totally ‘other’: because animals we are also, creatures in a world that challenges the balances, including political balances, of a difficult path of co-evolution.